"MERU, Kenya -- When he was 22 years old, Loren Davis bought 75 chairs from a funeral home and opened his own fundamentalist church next to a Hells Angels bar on the Houston docks. Someone shot out a window once, he says, but nobody ever came in to hear him preach."

"Every Sunday for three months, Mr. Davis stood before the empty seats and preached the Gospel as if he were Billy Graham in a packed stadium. Finally, he recalls, his mother showed up and, after listening to her son's solo sermon, suggested he find another career."

"What's amazing to me is my ministry has been rejected in America -- I'm a nobody -- and here this thing has just taken off," Mr. Davis said during five days of preaching in Meru, a rutted city of 125,000 on the flank of Mt. Kenya."

"Few American preachers, however, have seen their pastoral fortunes climb so steeply in Africa as has Mr. Davis. "I think there are going to be more Africans in heaven than Americans, because Americans have been systematically brainwashed," he says."

"It was in El Paso in 1957 that Mr. Davis witnessed the first of many miracles he says he's seen. When a bedridden man was carried into the revival tent, Mr. Davis remembers his father asking, "Is God going to heal you?"

"Sure enough, at a Houston missions conference in 1988, Mr. Davis says a Tanzanian man, seemingly out of the blue, told him: "You're the man. You're supposed to come to our crusade in Africa."

Mrs. Davis agreed: "That sounds like God to me."

"These days, Mr. Davis says, he regularly draws big crowds, including 400,000 at a crusade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The estimates are guesses at best, but footage of a Nairobi event last year shows an audience that certainly ran into the tens of thousands. His final night preaching in Meru, a far smaller city, brought out 4,000 people, according to a head count done from photographs. Even that's an audience he could only dream of back in Texas."

"The couple spends half their time in suburban Houston, resting and raising money so they can spend the other half proselytizing in Africa. "It's hard for us to go home because of the hostility to the Bible," Mr. Davis says."

"Mr. Davis and his supporters think it's his message of biblical purity that attracts followers. Ben Mwangi, a 36-year-old former Muslim who says he made a living selling illegal narcotics before he found Jesus, says he likes the evangelist's view that Christians should "let the Bible be the final word." When he's not preaching in Nakuru, Mr. Mwangi volunteers as an interpreter, driver and aide for Mr. Davis."

"Afterward, Mr. Davis made his way down into his curtained sanctuary beneath the stage, where he sipped lemon tea. Outside, one of the Kenyan pastors asked the crowd if they want Brother Davis to return to preach in Meru some day. The raucous cheer that followed didn't surprise Mr. Davis.